


A Remembrancer in Westeros

by scribblesandscreeds



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Canon Compliant, Unfinished, WIP, as far as I can make it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 23:02:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4367648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblesandscreeds/pseuds/scribblesandscreeds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magic may change from place to place, but death is always the same.</p><p>Set after the end of the books in print as of November 2014.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was my attempt at NaNoWriMo 2014. I just wanted them to high-five...

Hands of Gold

_I'm getting faster. I had at least two seconds on the wave there. Alright now, slow down, don't fall into a pothole, Sabriel can run around them but she's got eighteen years of doing this on you... poke it with your sword... there, where it should be. Two steps forward, dodge left a little, check, five steps... this time a little diagonal... is it there? Yes, don't fall into it... why did they send me? There wasn't anything there... two steps right, this one's big, edge around it, there's another one right next to it... no name on the note, familiar handwriting though... ten steps now, walk in the park... insisting on full armour and regalia as well, strange... telling me to dress warmly as if I don't know... did the river just stop? Shh, stop moving a second... yes, it just started again. Alright, six more steps then left, something came through but maybe it doesn't know you know it's there... maybe it'll fall into a pothole itself... don't rush, look natural, but don't slow down. Nearly at the gate. Twenty paces with a dogleg to the left, get those words ready. Are those footsteps? No... not quite... say the words, through the waterfall, now faster, don't run, just walk fast... nothing to trip you up here... maybe it got close enough to see who you are and reconsidered. Water just stopped. Please be stupid rather than dangerous... are those necromancer's bells it's got? It's splashing it knows you know now run_

_faster_

_lift your feet_

_faster_

_don't look back_

_never mind the pain, RUN and don't fall_

_Life's right up ahead, you can make it just run and don't slow down_

_don't trip_

_GET UP GET UP GET UP it's RIGHT THERE KEEP GOING_

_bells – Ranna? Call everything nearby too – doesn't matter, do it -_

_NO_

_NO_

_GET OFF get the sword can't reach it bells then it's got my arms scream then – can't – not like Clariel please not like Chlorr I won't serve, I won't, I won't, I'll ring Astarael first – where are you taking me LET ME GO -_

  


Jaime

  


Jaime started awake with a jolt. He'd been restless the whole night, nerves on edge, feeding and tending his fire. There was plenty of dead wood around, the trouble was finding dead wood that was also dry. Every time he'd tried to sleep he'd jerked awake, sure that the fire was dying. If he could have just thrown a few more branches on and left them to burn, perhaps he could have rested, but he'd already learnt the hard and cold way that he had to constantly tend the fire to keep it alive. Throwing wet wood straight on put it out, so he had to stack branches near enough the flames to dry out before they could be fed to them, and quickly replace them with new ones. A lot of the wood was rotten, which helped it to dry but it burnt badly. Try as he might, he could not persuade a big enough blaze to catch to let it burn for long enough without burning down that he could shut his eyes.  
  
It was day now, at least. More wretched snow was falling. He had thought it stunning at first, the way the landscape hid under a smooth coat of white, mysterious and beautiful. Seen from the deck of a sailing ship the forbidding North was a bewitching seductress, making come-hither eyes and daring him to come and discover her secrets. Up close she was just a witch, hooked nose and shrieking cackles and all. Snow was beautiful if you could get out of it whenever you liked, and retreat to a warm cabin with a fur-piled bunk and cheerful crackling brazier. Snow, he had discovered, was cold and treacherous. And if it got slightly less cold, it was wet. He'd drowned his first couple of attempts at fire by not clearing the snow from the ground first.  
  
There weren't even burning embers left now. The watery daylight showed him a dark scar on the ground, filled with the black bones of unburnt twigs and ash that was a dirty off-white against the purity of the crystalline powder collecting on top of it.  
  
_Tyrion, where are you?_ He wondered, for far from the first time. _I need you. The realm needs you. Gods, I hope you did go to the Wall after all._

  


Lirael

  


Lirael left Death, the cold waters of its river lapping at her ankles, stepped back into her body and out onto crisp snow. She blinked, and frowned. Either she had been in Death for a lot longer than she thought, or this was not the same snow she had stepped off when she stepped into the river. Was she imagining that the trees looked different? She should have taken better note of her surroundings before she left her body there, unprotected. Sabriel would have called that a silly schoolgirl error. Sabriel had been a schoolgirl, so she would know. Lirael had not. The school in the Clayr's Glacier was nothing like the ones south of the Wall, where Sabriel had grown up.  
  
Shouldn't there have been a path to her left? She was sure she remembered there being a path. Hadn't she walked into the clearing, cast a diamond of protection, knelt down on one knee and entered Death perfectly normally? There was no diamond, either. Nothing had harmed her in life, luckily, nor had anything untoward happened in Death. Nothing had been lurking there that shouldn't have been, so she had come back. Come out, at least. Back was questionable.  
She turned slowly in a circle, looking for the path, and nearly jumped out of her skin. A giant, bloody face was watching her. When the thumping in her chest had slowed a little from the initial shock, she made herself step closer, leaving deep footprints on the virgin snow, and examine it. It was just red eyes and a mouth, really, carved into the trunk of a great white tree. Upon close inspection the red turned out to not be blood at all. It was sap, long since oozed out of the tree and crystallised in the cold air.  
  
_What sort of tree are you?_ She wondered, poking at a bulge of solidified sap with her finger. It broke off, a flat-sided drip of ruby red like a raindrop frozen in time. _I don't think I've ever seen a white tree with scarlet leaves before._ She stepped back, suddenly feeling embarrassed as if the tree could feel her examination of it, as if she'd loudly pointed out someone else's acne. The eyes were still looking straight at her. They were hard eyes, but not exactly cruel. The mouth withheld secrets. _And where did you come from?_  
  
It was cold, almost as cold as Death. Lirael shivered and pulled her blue and green surcoat closed. Her right hand felt slow and clumsy. She frowned again – constructed of gold and magic, it shouldn't be affected by the cold. Sameth had built her a hand that was, in some ways, better than the flesh and blood one that she had sacrificed to bind the creature Orannis and prevent the destruction of the world. It could not be hurt, was far stronger than a natural hand, and never cramped. Sabriel had said she wished she could have had a hand like that at Wyverly, when she had been writing essays and exams. Lirael suspected that she was just trying to make her feel better. She had, after all, had her hand bitten off. She had unwillingly swapped a part of her body for an extremity which, however close an approximation to real flesh it could be, whatever strengths or abilities it may have(or have built into it at a later time – Sameth had been quite clear that as his skills as a Wallmaker developed and improved, so would his aunt's prosthetic) beyond those of the one she'd lost, was not a part of her. It had not grown as part of her, been part of her for all her life, it had been built. It had some annoying side effects too - sometimes it sparked and snapped in particularly dry weather, especially in the library of the house on the Ratterlin with the thick, plush carpet.  
  
Nontheless she had grown so used to the gold limb that she had all but forgotten what it was like to have two non-magical hands. But now it felt as ungainly and numb as when her nephew had first fitted it to her arm and shown her exactly which magical marks to draw from the Charter to operate it, and bind it to her will and nerves so that she didn't even need to think about it, just use it as normal. She tried to flex her fingers. They obeyed, but reluctantly.  
  
“What happened to me?” She whispered aloud. There was a soft sound from the bandolier strapped across her chest. The gentlest of sounds, like the last reverberations of a bell that has rung and stopped. Kibeth. The Walker. The Disreputable Dog. The bell that, depending on how she was rung, could make the dead walk and the living want to dance. _Trust you to break the rules and ring of your own accord._  
  
“Are you telling me that I have walked?” Lirael asked.  
  
The tone sounded again, though she had to strain her ears to detect it. She wondered if she had imagined Kibeth's voice, but she didn't think so. She knew six of the voices of the seven bells with varying degrees of familiarity, and had no desire to ever hear the seventh again even as the merest ghost of a sound, as this had been.  
  
There was something else, as she held still and breathed as quietly as she could, listening hard. The silence was not absolute – beyond the tree with the face she could make out some other sound, though it was indistinct. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, though she couldn't say exactly why. The same bell rang again.  
  
“Walk.” She whispered.  
  
_Ding._  
  
“Walk away from it?”  
  
Silence.  
  
“Walk towards it?”  
  
_Ding._  
  
Lirael stood unsure. She didn't know where she was. Perhaps if she went straight back into Death and retraced her steps, she would re-emerge in the forest clearing she had been in before... no, that wouldn't work. She didn't know how, but she knew it was true. Besides, it would mean leaving her body inert, alone in an unfamiliar place, with who knows what hidden amongst the trees.  
  
“I wish you still used words, Dog.”  
  
_Ding!_ The bell rang a little louder, a little more insistently.  
  
“Alright, alright. I'm going.”  
  
It was winter in the Old Kingdom, dark and cold. There had been heavy snows for weeks, which were just beginning to look like they might ease. But while it had been cold, it hadn't been this cold, at least not yet. Perhaps the promising thaw had been the weather teasing her with a false dream of spring, before this new cold snap. Lirael would have to start moving soon or risk freezing to the spot.  
  
She stepped around the tree, glad to not have to turn her back on those eyes. She didn't want to see whether or not they followed her. There wasn't a path, but she could pick her way through the trees well enough with the rustling sound as her guide. She was grateful for her thick winter boots on the uneven ground. Now that was odd, she didn't remember putting them on.  
  
She felt the presence of something dead up ahead just as a voice cried out  
  
“Stay back! Any closer and I will kill you!” She hesitated, hands going reflexively to her bells and sword. Then she heard the whisper of a sword leaving a scabbard, and a further cry of  
  
“I said stay away!”  
  
She broke into a stumbling run.

  


Jaime

  


Jaime slashed and stabbed at the silent figure with desperation and dull horror. His assailant was slow and clumsy, but he just wasn't stopping. And that eye was too blue. Where there should have been a second eye, only metal splinters stuck out of a socket. That skin was too white, and didn't bleed when cut. Jaime made contact with the point of his sword and dragged down, felt the flesh beneath the black jerkin give, and was sure of seeing a spurt of hot red or at least blood on his sword, but withdrew a clean blade. And the man _(creature)_ didn't even flinch, let alone slow down. He stepped back, avoiding a downward stroke of a blade that, through some trick of the light, looked like a sheet of ice. He was pursued. He stepped back again, raising his sword to block another cut, barely in time to prevent himself from being sliced open from shoulder to gut. He forced his opponent back, with a weapon suddenly almost too cold to hold on to. As the man _(creature)_ staggered back, he gripped Jaime's blade with one hand. Jaime saw, in a split second, frost form on the steel and would have dropped it if his own hand hadn't been frozen, clawlike, to the grip. Then the blade shattered.  
  
Jaime's reflexes were too good for him to gape down at the ruined sword in disbelief, as a lesser man would have done. As most men would have done. He stepped backwards again, but had lost his bearings and found his back against a tree.  
  
_They're real. Gods, they're real._ The pale man raised his blade again, and as Jaime wondered if he could get the knife out of his boot before it came down, he heard the ringing of a bell. It rang with a deep tone, a bell for giving commands and instructions.  
  
_You hear bells when you die? I thought you were supposed to see your life flash past your eyes._  
The strange man _(dead creature)_ paused at the sound. His stony face had something like an expression of confused hostility for a brief second, then froze again. A second bell, a merry, dancing bell, replaced the first. The pale man trembled, and jerked, and Jaime took advantage of the distraction to stab the shards of his sword into his foe's remaining good eye. He crumpled.  
  
The ringing of the bell ebbed away, and Jaime felt stillness return to his limbs. He tore his eyes up from the corpse at his feet, and saw a young woman emerging from the trees, a look of fierce concentration on her face, a bell in one hand and a sword in the other. Her stare wasn't fixed on him, but the dead man. A quartered surcoat of blue and green covered what he supposed was a sort of armour, made of overlapping scale mail. Long, straight black hair was held off her face with a blue headscarf. The maid wore breeches, which might have surprised a man who hadn't spent a boyhood switching places with his twin sister, or traveled in the company of the Maid of Tarth. Jaime had learnt to not be surprised by much that women might choose to do.  
  
The oddest thing was the broad leather bandolier across her chest, which had several pouches of increasing size down its length. All but one had a polished wooden handle sticking out of it. A moment's puzzling told Jaime what they were for. The third smallest was open, and empty, its contents in the woman's hand. Half a dozen bells, worn like weapons. With an obviously practised move she flicked the bell upright, fully silencing it, and returned it to its place on the belt.  
Only then did she look at him.

  


Lirael

  


“Are you alright?” Lirael asked the man with the broken sword. He was fairly tall, fairly handsome, fair of hair, and looked about the same age as her brother-in-law King Touchstone. Though some of that could have been the stubble just graduating into the state of beard, unkempt, on his face. It looked as though he had been caught unawares by the dead creature – there were some pieces of armour lying on the ground, by a cloak and pack. They were gilded.  
  
“Yes. Yes, I'm unhurt. Thank you for your concern. I'm sorry that you had to see that, my lady.” He pointed at the heap of remains on the ground. He pointed with his left hand, with the shattered stump of his sword. “He – he shouldn't have crossed me.” Lirael raised an eyebrow.  
  
She went to the body, an indistinct shape under a cloak. Having placed Kibeth back into the third smallest pouch on her bandolier, she withdrew Saraneth again, fingers firmly holding the clapper. This Hand's spirit had gone back into Death with a struggle, and though it would not be able to get back, others may be lurking for the opportunity to inhabit the body it had just vacated. She rolled it over. One bright blue eye bristled with steel splinters, the other was a gelatinous mash in its socket. Its hands, which initially she had taken to be wearing gloves, turned out to be naked, black with blood frozen under the skin. All of its clothing was slashed, stabbed through remnants of fine velvet and wool, stiff with dried – or frozen - blood around the cuts. All of it was, or had once been, black. The man this creature had once been had been athletic, well muscled and tall. Judging by the perforated state of his clothing he hadn't gone down without a fight.  
  
_Intelligent for a Hand,_ she mused. _Impressive that it didn't just try to eat him, it must have held onto its memories of sword fighting. And its body is well preserved in this cold._  
  
The cold. The cold was bothering her. It had been cold lately, yes, but not cold enough to freeze a body that had – she saw, completing a cursory inspection of the corpse at its feet – walked all the way through the soles of apparently good quality boots. And the flesh of its feet. White bones showed through the blackened and dirty flesh, and several were missing. Even if it had been raised already disintegrating from its grave, it must have walked hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to do that – months of constantly putting one foot in front of the other, and that was if it had been traversing particularly rough and rocky terrain. Longer than it had been winter. It should have rotted away by now.  
  
The cold was also bothering her in a far more practical way – she was freezing. 

  


Jaime

  


Jaime stared at the strange young woman as she unbuckled the dead man's cloak, rolled the frozen body off it, then picked it up.  
  
“You should burn that.” He croaked, and was surprised by the sound of his voice. Where was his strength, the steady, firm tone that gave orders that could not be disobeyed? He was a battle commander! What came out of his mouth was a husk. To his dismay, he realised that he was trembling. _The cold,_ he told himself. _I'm just shivering from the cold._  
  
Had he thought, for a moment, that the dead man was an Other? Gods, he must be half crazed from the cold. He had fought and bested the finest swordsmen the realm had to offer up as competition in his time, winning fights both playful and deathly serious with an easy confidence that informed every aspect of his life, but whoever they had been and wherever they had come from, they had been flesh and blood men who suffered from their wounds and yielded or died before him. This one was no different, not really. A man could move quietly. A man could be so pale he was practically white, and so cold that he didn't bleed easily. The Others were a myth, a tale told of the wild North, a bogeyman to scare children who wouldn't listen to their nurses. They were no more real than dragons and merlings.  
  
With a strong effort of will, he stilled the trembling in his body which made his voice sound afraid. He didn't feel quite so cold, now that the fight was over, which just went to show the contrariness of the North. Fighting was warm work anywhere sane.  
  
“Don't worry.” The young woman said, with something annoyingly like pity in her eyes and voice. “It's not coming back.”  
  
“Coming back? Of course it's not coming back. It's dead. I killed it – him. I killed him. Look, it had my sword sticking out of its eye. His. His eye.” He tried to ignore the fact that it seemed to have the remains of someone else's sword sticking out of the other one.  
  
Crazed from the cold. He hit up on the idea, and seized it. Yes! The man had been crazed from the cold. That could happen up here, if you let the cold get into you for too long, he'd heard people say that, hadn't he? Or maybe from the wound itself – with that many pieces of metal sticking out of his eye, it was all but a certainty that poison would have got into it. No wonder he'd been mad and unstoppable. It would have gone straight into his brain. It was a wonder he'd been up and walking, really, even as clumsily as he had been.  
  
“I know.” She said, the only hint of a tremor in her voice from obvious shivers. “I saw. I've sent it back into death. It will be well into the fifth precinct by now-” She cut off short, as he stared. He watched her face and could have sworn he saw her amend her choice of words. “It's no danger now. And it was wearing a perfectly good fur cloak.” So saying, she shrugged into it, the ragged hem trailing on the ground around her feet. The strap passed around her body as it had the man's, but she buckled it as small as it would go, all the way to the last hole, and it was still loose on her. She had to thread the belt under the bell bandolier to make it stay tight, the weight of the bells holding it still. He had to admit that though tattered, the cloak was a fine garment, and it would be a pity to see it go to waste. He thought longingly of the clothing and other provisions he'd had to abandon back at the wrecked ship. The furs, the woollens, a second pair of good boots, the rest of his armor... everything he'd been unable to carry on his own back. He had come prepared for the North, with his warmest wardrobe, dried fruit and meat enough to break the backs of a caravan of mules, sacks of salt for preserving fresh meat, a one-man tent and a small pavilion, a pot-bellied iron stove, half a kitchen's worth of pots and pans, two swords(though he only had enough hands to wield one), sacks of dried oats to feed the mounts and pack animals he had been confident of acquiring once he came into port, a small armory of lesser blades, two oilstones, a bow and quiver(though he was a swordsman, archery seemed more likely to catch him fresh meat) and his second most ornate saddle and tack. _Sea Giant_ 's captain had assured him that he would be able to find a guide in the North to help him on his journey. The captain had died with the contents of his belly showing. As far as he was aware, Jaime was the only survivor.  
  
Now he had the clothes he stood up in, his breastplate, greaves and gauntlets, a dwindling sack of oats stuffed into a now misshapen and blackened pot, the butchered and dried remains of the horse that had taken him away from the smoking ruin of the fishing village before collapsing, a couple of knives only really good for throwing that had happened to be in his boots at the time, his golden hand, and Widow's Wail. Widow's Wail was an excellent blade with a terrible name. It was spellforged Valyrian steel – but with its lions head pommel, rippled red and black surface and golden binding, it couldn't be more distinctive if it had the word “Lannister” inlaid in gold down the centre of the blade, so he tried to keep it hidden. He'd been using a battered, ugly piece of steel taken from the armory of the Red Keep before making his way out of the city that some gold cloak would probably catch hell for losing. It had proved useful against the marauders who'd sacked the village his ship had limped into. It had evidently seen a lot of service, and now lay in pieces in the snow. He'd never seen steel break like that, like smashed glass, before.  
  
“Sable, I think.” To his satisfaction, his voice came out normally. He looked down at the body again. “That needs to be burnt, if you're done looting it.”  
  
How it was to be burnt, he wasn't sure. His fire had gone out. He'd tried to stay awake, stay vigilant, but exhaustion had overtaken him on the fourth night and without a constant feeding of sticks and twigs, his fire had burnt down to embers. If it hadn't, perhaps the man would have stayed away. _No, that's wild animals. Men don't fear fire. Even so..._  
  
“Yes.” She replied, and knelt down by the corpse again. She bent its arms up – with difficulty, he noticed, it had seemingly frozen solid as soon as it was dead _(again)_ – so that they were crossed over its chest. Then she whispered – he thought he picked out the words “walk without regret. Do not come back.”, and some oddly resonant gibberish. She still had her sword in her hand, pointed it at the corpse's chest and repeated the queer non-words, and it caught fire, apparently by itself.

  


Lirael

  


Lirael largely ignored the man as she dealt with the final dispatching of the Hand. He was clearly shaken by his experience with the dead creature, if not actually in shock. It sounded to her like he was having trouble not babbling. While he would probably not admit it, he'd be better off with a few moments to compose himself without her watching. He had fought well, though.  
  
When she formed the marks of fire, cleansing, peace and sleep in her mind, they seemed sketchy and slippery. The first time she tried to cast them into the body they unravelled and dispersed in the air almost as soon as they left her mouth. With a clumsy hand she drew her sword, and pointed its Charter-spelled blade at the corpse, both hands on the grip. This time the marks felt stronger, and dripped slowly down the sword until they met in their target and began to smoulder there. Smoke rose in a thin, lazy thread from its torso. Then flames burst out of the black woollen rags, caught, and began to consume.  
She stood and watched for the few moments it took for them to burn completely. It should have been instantaneous. That worried her.  
  
“A useful trick.” The man said, breaking the silence. She looked around.  
  
“You haven't seen that before?” She asked. He smiled a winning smile of gleaming white teeth, but stopped again quickly before the cold could get into them.  
  
“I have seen a magician produce gold dragons from a child's ear with his hands at my father's hall, and I have seen a man in a marketplace eat and then belch fire, but I have never before seen a person use their fingers to produce fire.”  
  
Curious. But not everyone used magic, or even witnessed it frequently. There were many more Charter mages these days, since the Restoration, but for a long time they had been scarce in some quarters. Knowing that you might be murdered to have your blood used to break a Charter stone had once encouraged those who survived to keep a low profile - perhaps magic was still quite rare in this little corner of the Kingdom. Lirael looked to the man, whose troubled eyes were still on the ashes of the Dead Hand that he had been fighting.  
  
“I don't suppose you can tell me where I am, can you?” She asked. As well as being a question she needed an answer to, the change of subject might help the man return to normal. “I'm afraid I'm rather lost.”  
  
He sighed, and met her gaze.  
  
“Then that makes two of us, my lady. I had hoped that you would be able to tell me. I've been wandering these woods for days - I'm making my way south, trying to get to the Wall.”  
  
“Are you from south of the Wall?” Lirael asked, understanding beginning to bloom.  
  
“Yes.” He replied with something like surprise. Well, if you were from anywhere that wasn't the Old Kingdom, Lirael supposed that it would seem very strange here. If he felt out of place, perhaps he believed it was written all over him, though in all honesty she hadn't guessed just from the look of him. For a start, he had the good sense to have acquired armour.  
  
“Ah. Well, you're doing very well, if you don't mind my saying so.” She supposed he must be some sort of nobility, educated at one of the private schools where they still taught swordplay as a sport. The idea had somewhat boggled her mind when Nick had casually dropped it into conversation that the shortsword the Royal Guard were training him with was so much heavier than his fencing rapier. Swords were not, in Lirael's experience, for playing with.  
  
“Doing very well at what?” He asked, bending to pick up the greaves he'd apparently not had time to strap on before. He knelt to put them on, which he did awkwardly, holding them in place with his right hand and threading and buckling the straps with his left.  
  
His accent was odd, difficult to place, but if he was from the upper classes, that might explain it. Most of the Southerlings she had spoken to – often through interpreters – had been farmers and fishers, blacksmiths and bakers, people who worked with their hands and thus were relegated to the lower classes. His unfamiliarity with the most common sort of Dead pest was something she'd seen a lot of in the past few years from Southerling refugees though, that and calling Charter fire (and Charter wind, Charter Sendings, Charter anything) a trick. The newcomers to the Old Kingdom were from hundreds of miles away, fleeing war-torn lands beyond neighbouring Ancelstierre's borders. Given how difficult it was to move between the countries at normal times – and how different the Old Kingdom was to anywhere else – it was no great surprise that they were mostly completely unprepared for the realities of her homeland. Very little was known of the Old Kingdom beyond its borders. Even in Bain, barely twenty miles from the heavily fortified wall that marked the border, there were people who claimed to not understand why their new electric lights would extinguish or why the sound from the wireless would crackle and die when a strong wind blew from the north, even if they did still hang rowan twigs above their doors and burn sage to cleanse their houses in spring. Stories of magic and mystery in their new home had been dismissed by the owners of the few ears they had reached in the far South as fanciful inventions of overactive imaginations, until they saw them confirmed with their own eyes. Even then, not always. _There's none so blind as those who won't see._ Denial could be a powerful force.  
  
“Adapting to to the way things are in the Old Kingdom. I gather it's rather disorienting at first, if you're not from here. I know things aren't the same, our... customs and traditions are quite different to what you find in other countries.” Lirael adopted the tone she often used with the Southerlings, balancing friendliness with authority.  
  
“Now that I couldn't answer for, my lady. Yours is the first friendly face I've seen in five days.” He remained semi-kneeling to open his pack, and pulled out an ornate red and gold scabbard. What looked like real rubies studded the length of it. He withdrew the sword from the scabbard – it was an impressive weapon. Ostentatious, even. It had a gleaming gold pommel and grip, and a blade of rippled red and black. It looked untouched, the edge of the blade without even the tiniest notch or scratch. Lirael wondered if it had ever been used, or if it was supposed to be purely ornamental. He smiled at her. “At least, you're the first person I've seen who wasn't immediately trying to kill me.”  
  
He must have got his clothing up here, most likely when his Southerling clothes fell apart. Nothing made by machine lasted long in the Old Kingdom, where magic worked and technology didn't. If he had come up from Ancelstierre or beyond, he would have had to replace almost everything he'd brought with him. The armour must have been expensive – only a rich man would buy gilt steel, and only a brave or stupid one would display it, out here in the wilds.  
  
“And you're by far the most comely.” He smiled again, and Lirael felt her heart sink. She did not want to have to fend off unwanted romantic advances on top of being lost in a forest. Apparently her face said this for her, as the smile dropped off his and he returned his attention to his gloriously decorated sword, sliding it into the plain, battered scabbard that hung from his belt. The scabbard had been three quarter length on the sword it had come with, but completely concealed the shiny, rippled red and black blade of the new one.  
  
“Which way is the Wall from here?” She asked, getting back to the most pressing issue. If she could get to the Wall, at least, she would know where she was. It might be a long way back to the Abhorsen's house on the Ratterlin – several days at worst, by foot – but she wouldn't be lost any more. And that was if she even had to go all the way to the Wall, she was bound to find and recognise a landmark before then. The man shrugged and pointed, away from where she'd come.  
  
“I just keep heading south. Eventually I'll reach it, or the shore.” Lirael nodded. It might not be the easiest route, or the most comfortable, but you couldn't deny the logic. Keep going in one direction for long enough and you'd have to hit a boundary of some sort. In this case, south meant running into the Wall. Eventually.  
  
“What made you come up here?” She asked, curious. He didn't strike her as someone who had lost everything, like the majority of the southerlings had.  
  
“I'm looking for my brother.” He sounded bleak. “I never thought I'd want to see him again after what he did, but I need him. He told me some things that I didn't want to know and refused to believe, but he was right.” He scratched the bridge of his nose with his right hand. It looked a bit awkward. “Unfortunately, by the time he was proved right, he was long gone. Gods alone know where. I helped him disappear from King's Landing, but he could have gone anywhere from there.” He stopped and laughed. “I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm telling you this. We're far too far north for you to have seen him.”  
  
Lirael had never heard of anywhere called King's Landing. Still, place names sometimes changed, especially after conflict. Perhaps she knew it by another name. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty she had practically lived in the Library of the Clayr, a repository of knowledge so vast and ancient that it was housed in a great glacier. She had read atlases and traveller's tales for fun, when the idea of exploring even as far as, let alone beyond, the valley she was born in seemed as remote as the stars. Since then she had walked in Death, all the way to the Ninth Precinct, and all but touched the stars. She had saved the world, paid for the continuing existence of creation with no more than her right hand. The enormity of that fact still had the power to stun her into silence. It gave her some perspective when she felt melancholy about the missing extremity. She had tamed lesser Dead by the hundreds, and defeated greater Dead by the dozens. In doing so she had travelled nearly every inch of the Old Kingdom. Far too much of it looked the same - after a while the forests were hard to tell apart. And the man she'd just saved from some sort of Dead creature didn't seem to know where they were, either. Wonderful.

  


Jaime

  


“Do you have a name?” The curious maid asked.  
“Of course, where are my courtesies? I am Jaime Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and Lord of Casterly Rock.” He didn't think that the woman meant him any harm – she had just sheathed her sword – but he didn't think it would do any harm to impress upon her that if she changed her mind and decided to sell him out to his foes, he was worth all but a king's ransom.  
“And your good self, my lady?”  
  
The woman raised what looked like a disbelieving eyebrow.  
  
“Lirael. Daughter of the Clayr, Remembrancer, and Abhorsen-in-waiting.” He listened with polite interest. The titles meant nothing to him, but who knew anything of Wildling heraldry? Her stare became piercing. “Queen Sabriel is my sister.” Well, apparently they had royalty. Jaime barked a short laugh.  
  
“Well met, Princess Lirael of the Clayr! Queen Regent Cersei is my sister. I must confess, I have never heard of yours.” He bowed.  
“But as a knight, sworn to protect the innocent and vulnerable, and especially one who has vowed to guard royalty, I would be honoured to accompany and protect you on your journey, my lady.”

  


Lirael

Having mostly grown up in the nearly all-female community of the Clayr, Lirael had gained all of her practical knowledge about men in the past couple of years, and that was little enough. One thing she did know though is that a man's pride is easily bruised, so she refrained from reminding him that so far the only protecting had been done by her. It was her responsibility, and her bloodright, to protect the living from the dead. If she let him wander off by himself, and there were more Dead in the woods, he probably wouldn't survive another attack. She couldn't let that happen. Besides, they might manage better between them to find a way to the Wall. And if he did try anything unwelcome... well, he might be bigger than her, and as good a swordsperson as her, but he obviously wasn't a Charter mage, and she didn't smell Free Magic on him. If she couldn't dissuade him, she could defend herself.  
  
“Alright,” She nodded. “We'll travel together, and look out for each other.” She held out her hand. “Agreed?”

  


Jaime

  


It was a gesture so normal, so habitual, that Jaime didn't think twice before reaching out his hand to clasp hers. Jaime always had his sword hand in his dreams and memories. No-one had tried to shake his hand since he'd lost it. People didn't like to remind him – or themselves – that his hand was gone, so with the exception of one foolish slattern who had thought he could feel her caressing his golden fingers, they avoided touching it. He extended his hand to meet hers, forgetting for the moment that his fingers could not move. _You are a person I do not consider to be a foe,_ a handshake said. _I will incapacitate my sword hand if you will do likewise and thus we will agree to be mutual non-threats,_ it said.  
  
  
It did not normally say _CLANG._


	2. Chapter 2

Lirael

The shock of impact ran up Lirael's arm, and her golden fingers curled around Sir Jaime's thickly gloved ones even as she registered that they were hard, unyeilding, and unmoving.  
  
“Oh!” She exclaimed, then let go. “Your hand...”  
  
“My hand.” There was a heaviness to his voice and a dullness in his eyes that hadn't been there before, that she didn't think was due to her. “I sometimes... I forget.” He laughed, a sound that this time was somewhat forced. He peeled off a pointlessly fur-lined black glove, tugging the fingers off with some difficulty, to reveal a finely wrought but inanimate golden sculpture of a hand. It was fitted into a leather cuff that disappeared into his sleeve, where presumably it was strapped onto the stump of his wrist. “I am, I must confess, a cripple.”  
  
Lirael reached up to her right elbow with her left hand, and pulled off her grey leather glove. She held up her own golden hand. It extended further than his did, halfway down her forearm, with nothing between her skin and the densely coiled gold wire. It hugged her arm without the need for glue or straps, held on by magic. But even if it hadn't been, it would have stayed on by dint of the perfect, snug fit. Sameth had been thorough to the point of perfectionism when he made the limb including the socket, arguing that she might some day need to visit beyond the borders of the Old Kingdom to where the Charter magic wouldn't work. He refused to run the risk of having one of his creations fall apart, and leaving her without any hand at all.  
Besides, he said, it was lazy to rely on magic too much. He had already been proven right – she'd gone over the Wall in pursuit of a Hrule, to bind it and stop its destructive progress in the non magical lands, and brought Nicholas Sayre back to the Old Kingdom into the bargain. She'd been close enough to her home, and the weather had been such that her hand had still worked, but the point was made. She might sometimes have to go to places without magic, so magic could not be relied upon to keep her prosthetic hand in place.  
  
“Me too.” She said. Sir Jaime – with a permissive nod from her – examined the structure of her fingers, holding and manipulating them with his left hand. She let it lie limp. He held her hand up to the light, and saw that some of it went straight through. Beneath the filigree gold wire skin there was a lot of empty space, which made it nice and light, around the the erzatz bones and tendons, the working parts. It looked like it should dent easily, but as Lirael knew and the knight found out with a gentle squeeze, her nephew's work gave no more than a slight flex under pressure.  
  
“They're jointed?” He observed, curling her fingers into a fist. She left them in that position. Maybe she would move her fingers where he could see later, but for now it seemed like a good idea to not make it obvious that she could. He already looked like he'd had as many surprises as he could deal with for one day without also seeing and having to accept that her hand was magic. If he had been observant enough to notice that she had been using it perfectly normally up until now, he hadn't put two and two together and noticed that they didn't make four. Perhaps he didn't want to.  
  
“That looks like it would be rather useful.”  
  
“Yes, it is.” She half lied. “It makes holding on to things easier.”  
  
“I cannot tell you how many cups of wine I have knocked over with mine.”  
  
“I forget I'm holding on to them.” Lirael elaborated on the lie with a little laugh, then straightened her right fingers out with her left and pulled her glove back on, taking care to make it look more fiddly and difficult than it was. “My arm's getting cold.” Sir Jaime shook his glove hard to force the fingers the right way out again, and wriggled it back onto his own gold hand.  
  
“We may as well start walking. There's no way of knowing how far we have to go.” He glanced around her, into the trees she had emerged from. “Do you have anything you need to fetch, a pack, or anything?” He sounded hopeful. She was sorry to disappoint him. She spread her arms.  
  
“I only have what you see.”  
  
Well, that wasn't strictly true. She had a roll of silver deniers tucked away in an inner pocket, her old librarian's whistle on a chain clipped to a different inner pocket, and a fountain pen Nick Sayre had given her tucked into the spine of a notebook in her satchel. He had, in his charmingly predictable way, started applying his scientific mind to magic as soon as he was even halfway settled in Belisaere. One of his first experiments was an attempt to establish exactly how complex a technology had to be before it was technological enough to fall apart in the world of magic, and one of the first southern objects he'd managed to recreate successfully was a pen with its own little ink reservoir behind the nib. He'd given it to Lirael with a bashful little explanation that it symbolised a coming together of the two worlds, and he knew she liked reading and thought maybe she'd like to make notes without having to dip a quill into an inkpot. It leaked and left ink all over her hand, but since she wrote with her right hand the stains wiped off easily with a damp cloth. She had asked Sabriel if she should mention the leak to Nick for the sake of his data being accurate, or keep it to herself in case he took it as a criticism of his gift. She had assured Lirael that it wasn't a flaw but an unfortunate accuracy. She had put a simple containment spell on the cap so that it didn't leak in her pocket. But otherwise she didn't have much of anything with her, really. 

  
  


Jaime

“You travel lightly.” Jaime observed as they began to walk. The wildling princess – Lirael, or so she had named herself – had a bag slung crosswise over her shoulder, under the bells, but he could see that it drooped at her hip, far from full. Her sword hung from her belt on the left, which struck him as wrong, but he couldn't immediately think why. Before donning the dead man's cloak, she'd had no hat or hood, only the scarf tied over her hair – was she somehow impervious to the cold, from living up here?  
  
The trees were wild things, growing unchecked. Their branches and remaining leaves concealed most of the sky above, and their fallen limbs and leaves concealed most of the ground below. Every now and then one was so skeletal as to allow a clear view of the pale grey clouds. It had snowed, and would snow again – under copses of evergreens, the soldier pines and sentinels, there were patches of ground that were not dusted white, but elsewhere the dead brown leaves of the trees had a thin crust of ice to make them sparkle.  
  
“Are there any villages nearby?” He asked the curiously garbed young woman, trying not to sound too hopeful. He hadn't seen any game in the days he'd been wandering southwards, and he was getting tired of the taste of watery porridge. If he found a village he could get some more provisions. Some onions, maybe a chicken or a rabbit, perhaps some cheese... any food that wasn't oats would be very welcome indeed. She shook her head.  
  
“I couldn't tell you. I'm not familiar with this neck of the woods.”  
  
“But you haven't passed any?” She just shook her head again. He wondered how, then, she managed to look like she had just stepped out of a castle bailey somewhere to begin a quiet few hours' watch. She looked like a sentry, with the minorly incongruous details of the curious bells slung across her chest and the fact that that chest was a bosom.  
  
They found a stream, thinly frozen over, and stopped to drink. It was as cold as water could be whilst still liquid, and though it made his teeth hurt, it was refreshing and welcome. They had been following what could be called, at best, a game trail, and the ground was thick with dead leaves and occasional hidden branches. Traversing it was hard – and warm – work. Jaime refilled his wineskin, which had been sadly lacking wine for several days but served to hold water just as well. A bigger stream might have fish. He wasn't entirely sure how he would go about fishing, with only a sword and a couple of knives, but it was a hope worth holding on to. The princess didn't have a wineskin. Nor did she have a bedroll, or any knife other than the sword hanging from her hip. Of course Jaime didn't have a bedroll either, but that was by force of circumstance, not choice. He smiled to himself.  
  
“What are you running from, Princess Lirael?” He asked lightly.  
  
“Excuse me?” She was kneeling by the stream, cupping her hand to drink. A haunted look crossed her face briefly, a flicker of uncertainty. “What makes you think I was running from something?”  
  
“Lirael – Princess Lirael, I beg your pardon -”  
  
“I'm not a princess. My sister just happens to be married to a king.”  
  
“ _Lady_ Lirael, then. I cannot help but notice that you have... well, nothing with you. Forgive me if I speak out of turn-” He smiled his most winning smile, that regularly made ladies' and some certain men's knees tremble “- but you appear to have left your stronghold without time to gather supplies for a journey, and you are garbed and armed as some sort of man at arms which makes me think that you had to engage in some subterfuge to get away. Does your queenly sister mayhap mistreat you? Your good brother the king? Perhaps an unwanted betrothal-”  
  
“There's nothing like that, mister Lannister.” Her tone was courteous enough, but also sharp enough to warn him to stop prying.  
  
“Forgive me.” The words fell out of his mouth easily, but then he stopped and looked at her askance. _Does she imagine a chain around my neck?_ “I am no maester, my lady. I am a knight, and a Lannister of Casterly Rock.”  
  
“And I am an Abhorsen.” She said, as if he should understand exactly what that meant. Perhaps the Abhorsens were a powerful clan, up here in the wilds. He wondered, in fact, that her clothing was made of such fine stuff. Her surcoat was brocade, with designs of gold and silver woven into the blue and green fabric. Her breeches were some sort of twill, her boots elegantly made and her gloves – long, all the way up to her elbows, presumably to hide her false hand – were finely tooled pale grey leather. Jaime had been given to believe that the wildlings above the wall wore nothing but furs and raw hides, adorning themselves with the bones of their slain enemies. The Abhorsens must be rich indeed, and trade with the civilised peoples beyond their borders to dress their servants(for surely this was a guard's stolen livery) so well. If she didn't want to return home, well, that was her affair. If he managed to force her to take him to her castle – did wildlings have castles? - he might receive a warm welcome for returning their wayward daughter, or he might find his head on a stake as a warning to others not to interfere in the ways of her clan.  
  
The light was beginning to lose its strength. Afternoon turned into night all too quickly up here, he'd found. And the night... the night took too long. A man could start to believe all sorts of things in the cold and dark, with nothing but his own thoughts for company and a camp fire to warm him. You could laugh about monsters in the day, with the sun shining down on you. When the dancing flames made the shadows shift and the dark pressed in all around you, it was all too easy to entertain the notion that you heard footsteps. When exhaustion made your eyes blur and skip it was even easier. Exhaustion battered at him every moment. He hadn't been able to sleep in three days.  
  
“Time marches swiftly onwards, my lady, and so should we.” He reckoned they should be able to walk another couple of miles before they would have to stop and use the last of the day to set up camp. It wouldn't take too long, without tents or bed rolls they would only need to light a fire. Perhaps they would have found something to kill and eat, too. He groaned inwardly – with a second mouth to feed, and a supposedly noble one at that, his oats wouldn't last half as long. 

Lirael

They followed the stream, if not necessarily south, at least down hill. Lirael followed the knight, as much to keep him where she could see him as anything else. He was too charming. He smiled and laughed too easily, and it didn't sound sincere. She hoped he was hiding nothing more sinister than his own fear. That tended to be what Southerlings tried to hide.  
  
After a while the stream bed flattened out, and the trees retreated a little. In warmer months the water would run deeper and wider, but for now it left a relatively clear path of frozen mud. They had to walk along it with one foot directly in front of the other and it was slick underfoot, but it was still easier than picking their way through the trees. There was a ragged strip of sky visible above them, a uniform flat grey of apathetic cloud.  
  
“Night will be on us soon.” The Southerling who defied what she knew of the conventions of the far south by not wanting to be called “mister” said. She looked up, and saw that he was right. The sky had gone from dove grey to steel. There wasn't going to be a sunset tonight, just a gradual darkening. Lirael opened her mouth to offer to make a Charter light, then shut it again. That would be magic. It might be best to wait until the next day to gently break the subject to him, when he would hopefully be in a less fragile state of mind.  
  
“What time is it?” She didn't know when she had come out of Death.  
  
“Late afternoon, I think?” Jaime glanced up at the sky. “It's hard to say for sure, but it's not as light as it was. We'd better make camp soon.”  
  
“I would far rather be behind walls by the time night falls.” _Especially if the dead are walking._  
  
“So would I, but it would seem that there aren't any walls to be had in this gods-forsaken place.” The smile that accompanied this pronouncement – Charter, didn't he ever stop smiling one way or another? - was a rueful grimace. She had to allow that he seemed to be right, though. If they kept walking they may well encounter a town and get lodgings, but if they didn't, they would have to try to set up their camp in the dark.  
  
Ahead the trees stopped. The stream opened out, and met a lake. They stopped on the shore, far enough from the trees that nothing could easily sneak up on them, and close enough to the stream that they could cross it and have the protection of running water on at least one side. They gathered what dry wood they could, and that which was less than completely sodden. Lirael, mindful of not using magic, watched the knight strike sparks from his flint and dagger into the damp kindling for a solid five minutes, before she remembered the notepad in her bag. It was a nice quality one, far too good for burning, but on the other hand there were blank pages in the back that weren't doing her any favours by just sitting there when she was damp and cold.  
  
“I have something we can use for kindling.” She said, reaching for it, and closed her fingers(remembering to use her left hand) on an unexpected object, a flat but solid oblong. She withdrew a brown paper-wrapped package, the corner of the paper stuck down with a red blob of sealing wax.  
  
“What's that?” The man asked. She squinted at the wax seal, and made out an impression of the Abhorsen's keys pressed into it. She tore the paper open, and found a solid block of nuts and dried fruit, stuck together with honey and sugar that had been boiled until it was almost as hard as glass.  
  
“Borderer's brittle.” She said with a smile. “The Sendings must have packed it for me.” Which was odd, as she hadn't been planning on staying out of doors. Perhaps it was one of the older ones. Sometimes the Sendings got a bit funny in their old age, and a couple of the ones at the house on the Ratterlin were considerably more bossy than faceless magical servants made of Charter marks ought to be. They seemed to know that they were a few centuries older than her, and tried often to treat her like a child, insisting on making sure she wrapped up warm and reproaching her – which, given that they had no faces, did not speak, and didn't engage in any form of direct communication, was quite impressive – if she did anything they deemed dangerous. But they did know their business, that of serving and protecting the Abhorsens, very well. She often found that they provided items she'd forgotten about, or hadn't known she would need, without her asking and sometimes – like now – she found little treats squirreled away in her bags.  
  
“Why do they call it that?” her companion asked.  
  
“The Borderers of the Great Forest make it. When they go out into the woods for several days at a time, they take it with them as a good way to get energy quickly. Boiling it all up together makes it easier to carry because you can just put it in a pocket. You can eat it on the go, and after a while it makes a nice change from game.”  
  
The paper from the package, loosely screwed up under some thin twigs and dryish leaves, burnt easily and soon ensured that they had a cheerful blaze in a little hollow dug into the ground. Lirael saved the wax seal.  
  
Sir Jaime shook out some oats into the misshapen pot, which together with a couple of generous handfuls of snow and half of the Borderer's brittle snapped into small pieces and stirred in until it dissolved made a pleasant enough porridge. They had to take turns with the spoon. He offered it to Lirael first, which she was sure was just politeness but appreciated anyway.  
  
“I'll take the first watch.” She said while he was still eating, and couldn't easily argue. They had dragged over a few pine branches to make the ground slightly more comortable, as well as plenty to burn. She watched his face, and saw him wrestle with some inner conflict.  
  
“It would be the more chivalrous thing to do to let you sleep, my lady.” She thought he sounded reluctant when he said that. Clearly he _wanted_ to sleep. He certainly looked tired.  
  
“You've been out here for five days, mister – sir Lannister. You could probably do with the rest more than me.” That, and she wanted to put off sleeping in his presence. She didn't know him, after all. _You didn't know Sam either, but you camped in the middle of a river with him._ A little voice whispered in the back of her head. _Yes, but Sam's my nephew, even if he didn't know it at the time. And – let's be honest – I could have taken Sam down with one arm tied behind my back. Jaime Lannister is a lot older than him, rather bigger, and he looks like he_ knows _how to fight._  
  
The woods and the lake were queerly silent, once he'd bedded down and stopped fidgeting. Lirael hadn't spent all that much time sleeping out in the wilds, but she was aware of a lack of small noises from the trees. She would have expected skittering, night birds calling, foxes making a meal of something smaller than themselves that had the bad luck to be in their vicinity. There was nothing, until she started pacing back and forth to keep her feet from going numb, and then there was only the crunching of her own feet on the ground echoing back at her from across the frozen water.  
  
She wished she could see the sky. If she could have found Uallus in the stars beyond the thick cloud blanket, she would know for sure that they were heading in the right direction. She thought they were, but she only had her intuition and the word of a man who had freely admitted to not knowing where he was that they were going south. The moon would have helped her to tell the time, but in its absense she marked the minutes and hours by how often she had to throw a new branch on the fire. When she judged it to be about halfway through the night, she woke the knight.  
  
“So soon?” He yawned, and cricked his neck. “My lady, will you sleep with your sword by your side?” he asked as she lay down, swordbelt doffed but by her side and ready to draw. Lirael smiled grimly.  
  
“I am a woman on my own, travelling with a man I don't know. Yes, I am going to keep my sword by my side.”  
  
“You don't trust me. Why should you?” He sighed. “But Lady Abhorsen, if I had a mind to rape you, I could have done it half a hundred times by now. Do you really think that you could prevent me?” She was taken a little aback by his directness and retorted  
  
“That's exactly what I think. You may be bigger than me, mister Lannister, and physically stronger than me, but I could boil your brain inside your skull if I had to.” Her hand rested on the pommel of a sword that had sheared through more Dead and Free Magic flesh than she could remember, Charter marks comfortingly quiescent under her skin.  
  
“A brave boast.” He smiled that smile again, though now it was subdued. “There won't be any need for that, I swear. Your honour is safe with me. I am King's Guard, vowed to chastity. Besides, I once had a man's head off for forcing himself on a woman who didn't want him. But here,” He removed the dagger from his belt and handed it to her, handle first. “If it will help you to rest easier, a dagger is an easier blade to wield at close quarters than a sword. You have my blessing to carve my heart out if I lie.”


	3. Chapter 3

Jaime

The morning came with no greater fanfare than the night had done. Jaime had slept better in half a night than he had in the past week, despite the chill and hard ground. A few times his eyes had darted open, found the fire burning, and eventually they had stayed closed. He had dreamt gentle dreams of journeys past, and of companions long since gone. He had dreamt of spring, the world turning green and prosperous, scars of war and winter fading away. The wildling not-princess didn't appear to be dreaming at all, lying still, wrapped up in her black fur cloak. When he woke her, her hand was already on his dagger, and though she lost a few seconds to remembering where she was, he had no doubt that she would have lashed out if she'd thought he was threatening her.  
  
_The maid fears rape._ It was a sad thought. _She is wary of me._ For all that she showed bravado and clearly wanted him to believe that she could defend herself, he was sure he had seen it reflected briefly in her eyes when he'd voiced it. _But why should she trust me? I'm a knight from the mysterious southern lands of steel weapons and stone castles._ Her sword was steel, though. Odd, unless it was stolen. He wondered who she could possibly have stolen it from. Perhaps he wasn't the only Southron knight ever to be shipwrecked this far north of civilisation.  
  
They broke their fast on the same fare that they had closed the previous day with, oaten porridge sweetened with her fruit and honey. The maid – Lirael of the clan Abhorsen – had discovered three more of the packages in her bag, though she seemed sure she hadn't put them there herself. However they had got there, he was glad. He'd tried just eating a piece, but it was so hard that he could barely chew it and it stuck his teeth together when he tried. It was intensely sweet, a delicious contrast to the dull grey of the oats on their own and the dried strips of horse that he'd been subsisting on. Eventually he'd sucked it long enough to free the nuts and crunch them between his teeth.  
  
As they prepared to move on, packing away the pot that hadn't had a forehead-shaped dent in it before his desperate flight from the dead village, Jaime watched the maid don her sword belt and smiled. He could finally put his finger on what was wrong. She was wearing the sword on her left hip, like most men. Most men drew their sword with their right hand, across the body, from the left hip. She had no more of a right hand than he did.  
  
Though he couldn't see the sun, one corner of the sky lightened before the rest of it, and he marked that as more or less east. Before they left, the wildling collected some of the half-burnt sticks from the dying fire. When he asked what they were for, she told him that they would make starting the next fire easier, and he could have slapped himself for a simpleton that he hadn't thought to do the same before.  
  
They stuck to the shore of the lake, which wasn't particularly direct but made for an easier walk.  
  
“You know, I didn't mean to come this far north.” Jaime said, as their path undulated around a curve in the lakeshore. Conversation would make the journey seem quicker, even if they lacked the horses that would actually _make_ it quicker. “I was only going to go as far as the Wall, and make enquiries after my brother there.”  
  
“He came north with the other Southerlings?” Lirael asked. Jaime supposed there must be trade between wildlings and civilised merchants, illicit though it would be. That she wore brocade was a good indication of that. Perhaps her people had met and traded with them, and her sword had been gained legitimately by a father or brother. Who she had then stolen it from.  
  
“He left the city alone, but who knows what companions he might have chanced upon? I know he was quite taken with the idea. You know, of coming north. After the trouble at King's Landing, I think he might have made his way back up here. They always need men at the Wall.”  
  
“Is he a soldier too?” She asked. _I'm not a soldier._ he might have said then. _I'm a knight and a commander, I rather outrank soldiers._  
  
“Hardly.” He replied instead. “Tyrion is a little short to be a soldier. I'm sorry, my lady – you look so civilised that I forget that you aren't from Westeros, and won't know our gossip.” A little flattery might help befriend the woman. If he happened upon her clan, that could make the difference between life and death. It was rather refreshing, though, to meet someone who didn't have foreknowledge of his supposed exploits. His reputation was a thing of exaggerations and fancies, and usually lacking his honourable deeds. “My brother is a dwarf. He barely comes up to my waist. He is no bigger than a child, but you would regret treating him as such, for he is in every other way a man grown. He has one of the sharpest minds I know, and one of the sharpest tongues. When last I saw him, he cut me to ribbons with it.” _She's been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for all I know... oh brother, why did you have to be right?_ “Which isn't anything compared to what he did to our father...”  
  
“Do you seek vengeance?” The lady asked. Something about her one suggested that she did not approve of the idea.  
  
“I mean him no harm.” Jaime tried to reassure her. “He had his reasons. I cannot condone kinslaying – the gods above know it to be one of the foulest sins there is – but suffice to say I understand why he did it. Our father never treated him kindly, and if any man had done what he did to my brother's wife to the woman I love, I might have loosed the crossbow bolt myself. I wouldn't have had the forbearance to wait fifteen years to do it, either.”  
  
“Did he kill her?” She asked. _Tysha. Her name was Tysha._ Tysha, so young and innocent when he and his brother had strayed across her. She had had all the sweetness of a simple country girl, who dreamt of nothing more exciting than the harvest dance. He still felt shame when he thought of his part in her downfall. He had been one and twenty, an anointed knight and member of the Kingsguard, and yet he could not have gainsaid his father in the matter of a young girl who had had the misfortune to marry his son. _I swore to protect the vulnerable. How well that turned out._  
  
“No. She may yet live, though it's anyone's guess where, or how. I would spare you the details. But my father killed her honour and reputation, and broke her spirit, then turned her out of doors. He poisoned my brother's memories of her with lies, and used her to shame him. Tywin Lannister did whatever he deemed necessary to protect the reputation of our House, however cruel. That was his way – whatever he thought was necessary, he did or caused to be done. Now he's gone, and we're all beginning to see just how important he was not only to House Lannister, but to the realm. My sister is now Queen Regent, and she tried to rule without him, but succeeded only in surrounding herself with fools and traitors and getting herself thrown into a gaol for... well, on trumped up charges. If we're to have any chance of peace and prosperity, she needs someone like our father to rescue her... and the only man who is like our father is the son he despised.”  
  
“So you need to find him.”  
  
“I need to find him.” He agreed. “If the storm hadn't driven my ship so far up the coast, I might have done so already. We were just lucky to find a fishing village that the captain could beach us by. Well. I was lucky, the rest of them died fighting the brigands. The village looked deserted when we disembarked. The ship was full of holes and slowly sinking, so the crew were hoisting all the cargo that they could out onto the beach. I was the only one with my hand near a sword when the first lot of them came, half naked savages and all with the bluest eyes you ever saw.” He remembered scrabbling for his sword at his belt, cursing his clumsy inability to draw it with the smooth, unthinking single motion that would have ended in death for his opponent that his right hand would have performed. One of the blue-eyed bastards had got close enough that the sword wasn't a viable option, and he'd grabbed the nearest object to hand to bludgeon it back away from him. That had turned out to be a long-handled iron cooking pot. Thank fuck he'd been persuaded to help unload the cargo. “They weren't even armed, most of them, they just tore the sailors apart with their bare hands. I did what I could to defend us, but the next thing I knew they were all turning on me, and it's just luck that the captain had an old nag in the hold that we had begun to load up with supplies from the galley, and she got loose. I disarmed the man attacking me, vaulted onto the mare's back, and clung on for dear life as she bolted.”  
  
The Abhorsen woman's face was a picture of dismay.  
  
“The king will have to hear about this. I'll send a hawk as soon as I can. I am so sorry, Lord Lannister. That is not the welcome anyone should get in the Old Kingdom.”  
  
“Thank you, my lady. And please, call me Ser Jaime.”  
  
They struck off from the shore and back into the trees when a stream broke away from the lake, blocking their way. It wasn't so large that they couldn't have crossed easily, but the lake veered off to the west from there onwards and the stream snaked off in a direction that looked closer to south. It wasn't much of a path, but it was better than endless, nigh identical trees. And that way they kept their feet dry.  
  
  


Lirael

“Where did you come from, Lady Abhorsen?” Sir Jaime's breath puffed white in the air.  
  
“It's just Abhorsen.” _and I'm only in waiting._ Half naked savages in this cold, tearing their victims apart with bare hands... he could only be describing Dead Hands. Lirael wondered if Sabriel knew of this increase in Dead activity. She hoped fervently that the next village would be big enough to have a message hawk mews – a single Dead Hand might be a dead spirit that had struggled its way back into Life and occupied a vacant body independently, but multiple Dead Hands meant that a necromancer was active in the area. She could probably deal with them herself, and intended to if she happened across the hapless fool who'd sold out to Free Magic, but the Abhorsen would have to be informed in any case.  
  
They trudged on, crunching frosted snow underfoot. Each step was an ordeal for aching, tired muscles and feet that had to probe and assess the ground every time they met it. Even though the trees were thinner here, the ground wasn't trustworthy. Lirael would have liked to stop, but they couldn't afford to waste the daylight. They had been walking for so long that they had to reach a village or hamlet soon. Then they could sleep behind walls, safe from any roaming Dead.  
  
“The Clayr's Glacier.” Lirael said, once the silence had got long and awkward enough for her to remember that Sir Jaime was still awaiting an answer to his question. “But I don't live there any more.” Queen Sabriel sometimes went to consult with the Clayr and brought Lirael with her, as her apprentice and heir apparent, but these visits were infrequent. With Orannis bound and split, and the fate of his servant Hedge a potent warning to any other necromancers with ambitions of world domination, incursions from Death and incidents of Free Magic had gradually reduced, until they were moderate and manageable. They would return, she knew. It was the nature of Death and the Dead to be persistent and patient, and of Free Magic to be wild and reckless. For now though – and hopefully a few years, maybe even decades more – most of her time was spent assisting the Settlement Scouts with finding and safeguarding places for the Southerlings to live, creating Charter stones, and doing her own special kind of research to try to fill the gaps in the Library of the Clayr.  
  
She was an honoured guest at the Glacier now, which was nice, but strange. Rather than having her own tiny room in the Hall of Youth, she had the use of the finest guest rooms. She would get her own bathroom and drawing room, meals delivered if she arrived too late or left too early for the common meals(where she had the honour to sit with the voice of the Nine Day Watch, whoever that was at the time), and someone would take away and return her laundry if she had need of it. If she took the Narrow Stair and met someone else coming the other way, all but the most senior Clayr would back down before her. She knew it was her due – as well as being the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, she had played a major part in saving the world – but it wasn't how she'd always dreamt of earning her seniority. Her young fantasies had been of getting the Sight, wearing the white robes and moonstones of the Clayr, Seeing some great portentous event. She had fancied that the moonstone circlet would gleam on her raven black hair like the night sky at full moon, before she learnt to hate her hair for not being blonde. A very young Lirael had harboured the delicious thought that her distinctly non-Clayr colouring was a sign that she was special, chosen by fate for some destiny above and beyond the norm. As it had turned out, she had been right. Four year old Lirael had been wiser than fourteen year old Lirael. Of course, four year old Lirael had still had her mother.  
  
In all honesty, she could have gone back far more often than she did, but the place of her birth held less of a draw for her than she would have imagined it would before she left. The refectory was is it had always been, full of Clayr and traders, but it felt impersonal now that she wasn't on washing up duties. She had gone down to the Hall of Youth once, with a vague notion of visiting Aunt Kirrith. She had been easy enough to find, Lirael had just followed the bellowing. She'd given Lirael a quick hug and an awkward peck on the cheek, told her that they simply must catch up some time, and hurried off calling out to a gaggle of tanned, blonde little girls about baths and bedtime. Lirael hadn't lingered there long. Her memories of that place weren't good. Only the library, and moreover her little Second Assistant Librarian's cubby-hole of a study, had made her glow warmly with nostalgia. It hadn't yet been reassigned when she was last there, so she could sit in the creaking old leather chair and breathe in the leather and paper, with the sharp hint of dust that never quite went away no matter how thoroughly the sendings cleaned, without fear of disturbance.  
  
“But just now? You don't look like you've been travelling out in the wild, my lady.”  
  
“I was...” She frowned. Where, exactly, had she been? “I was... I don't exactly remember.”  
That was odd. Now she came to think of it, the few hours before she emerged from Death were pretty fuzzy. That wasn't good for someone whose title was Remembrancer. “I entered Death, patrolled the gates, then came back... and when I came back, I was near where I found you.”  
  
“You were _in death?_ ” Sir Jaime asked, looking sideways at her. “And you _walked?_ ”  
  
“Yes.” She chewed her lip. “But that doesn't make any sense.”  
  
“You don't say.” She heard him mutter under his breath.  
  
“It shouldn't be possible. How could my body have moved when I wasn't in it?”  
The knight shrugged.  
  
“I had a great-aunt Naomi, formerly of house Wornwood– or was she a cousin twice removed? - Anyhow, she used to get up and walk in the middle of the night, still asleep. In the end, she tried to walk out onto a staircase that hadn't been there since she was a girl and fell to the gallery below. Broke her neck. Perhaps you did something similar.”  
  
“I suppose it might be something like that.” She said, with doubt weighing her voice down. “But I've never heard of it happening before.”  
  
Jaime shrugged again.  
  
“I've never heard of people walking in and out of death before.”  
  
“You really are from the South, aren't you... Sir Jaime.” She sighed a short sigh. “There's something you need to understand about the Old Kingdom. Something you probably won't believe without me proving it, but please, hear me out. I understand that down south you have technology. Machines. Artifices. We don't have that up here. What we have is magic.”  
  
  
  


Jaime

“Magic.” Jaime scoffed.  
  
“Yes, magic.” Her voice turned harder. “Spells, enchantments, sendings. Mages and sorcerers.”  
  
“My lady, I did not take you for an easily gulled fool.” Jaime laughed. “I have seen things that were called magic. There is always a trick, a hidden device, sleight of hand... what you have seen and been told will be no more than-”  
  
“Superstitious nonsense? Nothing that can't be explained by correct application of scientific method?” She finished for him, possibly using the most words in one go since they'd met.“Ser, I know someone else who once refused to believe in magic and he nearly destroyed the world. Look.”  
  
She held up her hand, cupping the air, and spoke a short word that didn't seem to quite match the sound that came into his head. There was a slight change in the air, like an echo of the pressure before a thunderstorm. His gaze was drawn to the space above her hand.  
  
Nothing happened.  
  
She looked perturbed, and even Jaime felt a slight tug of disappointment.  
  
“Impressive.” He couldn't help but say. Jaime watched with some amusement as she gave him a look that would ulcerate a stomach, pulled off her right glove and peered closely at her fingers. _Now what? Will she claim that such fine work can only be wrought by magic?_ For it certainly was fine work, as fine as anything that could be found in the workshops of Goldsmith's Row in King's Landing. It was a pretty thing. Where his hand had mother-of-pearl inlaid on the fingertips for nails, she had green enamel. He certainly liked the idea of pliable joints, and decided that when he got back to the city and everything was calm again he would have a new hand made with them. Then he might be able to hold a quill and improve his writing style from that of an illiterate five year old to a literate one.  
  
She said the same word again, a little louder and sharper. Again he felt like something _should_ happen.  
  
Nothing continued to happen. She looked puzzled, angry, afraid, puzzled again.  
  
“I don't understand.” He wasn't certain, but he thought there was a tinge of fear in her voice as well.  
  
“Perhaps you used up all your magic setting fire to that corpse.” He meant it mostly as a jape, and not a little as a jibe, but her face cleared with relief.  
  
“That's it. Magic takes energy, and I haven't slept well since the last time I had a bed.” She huffed a short sigh, and glared at him. “Fine. I can't show you now, but you'll see sooner or later.”  
  
“As you say, my lady.” He waited until her back was turned before he allowed his lips to curl up into a little smile. Magic. How droll. _And she claims to be able to walk in death._ He supposed these fancies and tricks were effective at impressing the primitive savages she'd no doubt lived her entire life with. He though was a Lannister of Lannisport, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard in King's Landing. It would take rather more than wild claims and setting fire to a dead body to impress him. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snow is treacherous, and ice is too. Lirael has to improvise some first aid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I aten't ded

Jaime

“Yannyl.”

They had walked in silence – at first sullen, then merely the product of their paying no attention to anything but their footing with the occasional glance up to try to ascertain their direction – for nearly an hour, and so the wildling's announcement caught Jaime by surprise.

“Excuse me?”

“That's where I was. Yannyl. I must have been, right by the Great Forest. Yes, there was a mordaut in a village... it was called... Noralton, it’s on the Three Oak Pass. I was on my way back when I must have gone the wrong way, and found myself here.” Was she saying this at all for his benefit? She could hardly expect him to have any clue what names the settlements north of the Wall might go by.

“What's a mordaut?” He asked, unwisely.

“A lesser dead creature. Parasitical. A mordaut will attach itself to a living host, and drain their spirit slowly, while using them to hunt for weaker prey. Usually children, and the elderly. If you're careful and lucky you can banish it without killing the host.”

“So when there is sickness in a village and it takes the old and young, you blame it on evil spirits and if your healing potions and chanted gibberish don't work, you can say it's not your fault. I'm not one of your savages, Lady Lirael. I am familiar with the ways of maesters.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.” She muttered darkly. “You are not in Iskeria, or wherever the fuck it is you came from, any more. This is the Old Kingdom, and you have no idea how much danger you're in. You are bloody lucky that I ran into you or you'd be dead by now, and probably enslaved.”

Jaime smirked a little behind her back, as she upped her pace to stalk away from him. Dead and then enslaved? Clearly she wasn't used to having her mystical mummery seen and named for what it was, and it rattled her.

Some of the ice underfoot was mud, some was full of rocks and twigs. The wildling picked her way irritably over it, which rather spoiled her attempt at stamping away from him. Ice and twigs crunched. Jaime strolled, regardless, down the streambed.

There was a sharp crack of breaking ice. Jaime looked down to his own feet to see his boot disappear through it. He started to tip over, fought for and regained his balance, then lost it again.

There was another crack, louder but muffled. He went down to his knee, and then down to his knee again.

“Oh, sh-sh-shit.” His voice shuddered out of his mouth. The pain hadn't registered yet, but his mouth had already stopped working properly. This was odd. This was new. He’d been injured before, he’d been nearly killed many times. It hadn’t even slowed him down, in the heat of battle. But there was no heat here.  
“Broken.” He panted. His foot – thankfully not still stuck through the hole in the ice – was pointing in an unnaturally turned out direction. “I think it’s broken.” His eyes bulged. His jaw was locked, voice forced out through clenched teeth.

“Shit.” The lady agreed. Jaime knew too many highborn maids to believe her language was unladylike, but he was still surprised to hear it coming from her. He looked down. He was momentarily at a loss as to what to do. When a horse broke a leg, you put it out of its misery. When a man broke a leg, you sent for a maester, camp healer or if you really had no other options, a washerwoman. Most of them could set bones and stitch wounds, as well as catering to the carnal appetites of soldiers. Some of them could, in a pinch, even wash clothes.

If he couldn't walk, he couldn’t protect her. She would have to stand guard every night. She wouldn’t need him. What use would he be? Her chances of getting to the Wall alive weren't all that wonderful to begin with. Dragging wolf bait around with her would make them considerably worse. But he was worth a king’s ransom, all but a king’s ransom-

“Don't leave me.” He was shaking. “My - my sister w-will reward you-”

“Your leg is broken.” The lady pointed out. She looked troubled, but he wasn’t fool enough to assume that she was concerned for his sake and not her own, if she lost him as a protector.

“I can keep going.” He insisted. “But I need -” He tried to move, and sobbed with pain that had apparently remembered that it was warranted. “-I need you to help m-me.”

“Let me see.” She knelt by his side, and he braced himself for contact. She ran her hand just over his leg, not quite touching, and frowned. Still within the golden greave it wasn’t possible to see exactly what had happened to his shin, but it was obvious from the angle that it sat at that something was very wrong. “We’re going to have to get this off. And your boot, and trouserleg.”

His eyes bulged again as she unbuckled his armour, the scream that he ground his teeth together to keep inside his mouth trying to find another way out. In amongst the mass of pain that his shin had become he felt bones grate against each other. When she removed the protective steel he discovered how much it had been holding his leg in place, and moaned almost lustfully as his foot and half of his shin shifted. Through the fog of pain he could almost have sworn he saw her using both hands to strip his leg further, up to the knee. Goosebumps pricked up as the frozen air bit into his exposed skin.

The leg was deformed by an extra joint where there shouldn't have been one. His skin was stretched beyond its natural dimensions by the broken bone pressing from within, but it held.

“Well, it could be worse.” he said with a forced, almost manic cheeriness.

The lady said nothing, running her hand slowly over the disturbed contours of his shin. He winced at her touch, and tried not to show it. She exhaled sharply, frustrated. 

“I can’t fix it properly. I can’t do magic properly.”

Suddenly her eyes lit with inner revelation, and she unsheathed her sword.

“No, no - please, my lady, no-” Jaime didn’t even hear his voice climb up into a shriek, or feel his body try to scramble away from her, he only saw the blade - the shining, sharp blade, coming towards him, not to change course at the last, to bite into his skin and flesh and bone - “don’t cut it off _I’m begging you don’t cut it off-”_

“Calm down!” she ordered, and though her voice had remained soft, it cut through his panic like a war horn. Her words echoed, and he obeyed without meaning to, his limbs and tongue stilling almost of their own accord. The lady pressed her hand to her chest, a gesture which looked more like suppression than an affectation of promise. The echo stopped. “I’m not going to amputate. Don’t be ridiculous.” 

And he felt ashamed, to have shown such cowardice at the sight of a sharp edge. Well might she call him ridiculous, he had reacted like a flighty maid at the sight of an unexpected rat. But she glanced at his hand, and the scowl left her face. 

“I’m not going to amputate. Do you hear me? I am not going to cut off your foot.” she repeated, holding his gaze until he nodded, then looked back down to his leg.

“Do you -” Jaime grunted softly as a throb of pain told him off for damaging himself “-have any idea what you’re doing?” 

He didn’t have many options other than to trust her. He hoped she would do something more than just chant at him.

“The first thing is to get it straight again. Then… I don’t know, I’ll have to see what I can do. You’ve broken both bones, but at least you’ve done it fairly cleanly. And you haven’t broken the skin, so you shouldn’t have to worry about infection.” 

“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” he tried to jape, but it came out plaintive. _Though I daresay it won’t hurt as much as having the rotting flesh of your arm pared away while you watch, and the raw wounds boiled with wine just when you think it’s nearly over._

“Like hell.” she said with a little incline of her head.

“You’re not supposed to agree with me.” He grinned, but it was just a reflex. A hot wave of agony spread up his leg, just in case he had forgotten about it. He gritted his teeth. “Gods, I would kill for some poppy milk.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could help with the pain, but even with Lihama, I’ve got so little magic to work with that I don’t dare.”

“Don’t let me pass out, will you?” Jaime panted, laughing a mirthless laugh. If he fainted she might walk off and leave him. “I’ll try not to scream. Too much.” 

The lady pressed her lips together, and passed him a reasonably clean looking stick.

“Bite.” 

Then she put her hand on his ankle, and with no warning, she pulled his foot sharply away and up. He almost didn’t have a chance to scream, and stifled it as best as he could. Even so, he screamed surprisingly loudly for someone with a mouth full of wood. If there were any people within a mile radius, he would have got their attention. Jaime just hoped that they had passed out of range of the madmen who had attacked the ship. 

When he felt safe to do so, he removed the splintered remains of the stick from his mouth, with trembling fingers.

“Thank you.” He tried not to sound faint. Looking down showed that his bones had found their way back to where they were supposed to be, his shin was a straight line again. “If I can keep it like that for a moon or two, without moving, I might be able to walk on it again.” The thought coaxed another desperate little chuckle from him.

“That’s the problem.” the wildling said seriously. “I can't give it time, that's easy magic but powerful and I don't have much power. I'll have to splint it like the Southerling healers do... you’re lucky you didn't break through the skin, though that would be easy to fix with a sticky net. Although-” The woman's eyes opened wide. “-If it can heal skin, it can hold bone, if I just alter the adhesion marks and make it rigid instead of flexible. Yes. Yes, that'll work!”

She bent back over the damaged limb, which was starting to swell despite the cold. With her teeth, she pulled her glove off. She started to use her bare fingertips to draw invisible symbols onto his skin... and then Jaime realised that he could see them. They were small, very faintly glowing but distinct marks. They tickled. As she sketched them, they joined together to form a loose mesh. She whispered all the while. None of it made sense. 

When her scribblings reached from just above his ankle to almost his knee, she sat back up. The faintly golden net rested on the surface of his now visibly bruising skin, glowing gently. She made a gesture with her thumb and forefinger as if she was spinning thread, gently laid the blade of her sword along his shin, and said another of her funny non-words. Etchings on the sword brightened momentarily, shining gold, then faded away. No – they didn't fade away, they flowed into the mesh, brightening it before it sank in. Jaime could see it, briefly, moving and shrinking beneath his skin before it went into his muscles and completely out of sight. They warmed briefly as the golden glow passed through, and he felt the heat wrap around his bones before cooling to leave a sense of _something_ still there, holding his bones together.

“That's not poss-”

“Shh.” She ran a hesitant hand down his shin, probing it. He winced and sucked in air when she reached the break site, marked by a deep purple blush, but it hurt a lot less.

“What did you _do_?” Jaime considered the possibility that maybe he was going mad. Gods knew he’d seen enough to drive him mad in his life, maybe his mind had finally given up. He could not have just seen the girl draw a working golden bandage onto his leg. That she was now dressing with the scarf from her head, and strapping his greave back onto. With the extra bulk of the swelling and fabric, the straps only just fastened on the loosest hole. She smiled a pale little smile.

“Fixed it. Temporarily. That should hold for long enough for the bones to start growing back together, if we’re lucky.”

"I don't know what you did, but it feels..." Jaime lifted his knee gingerly, anticipating excruciating pain. He didn't get any. His muscles were sore, and complained when he used them, but his bones didn't move even the slightest bit more than they were supposed to. "...it feels better."

"You should be able to walk on that." The wildling didn't sound too certain. "Keep your armour on, it'll help keep it in place. Just in case."  
She helped Jaime to his feet, and he could walk. It still hurt, and his uneven gait wouldn’t take him far before he had to rest, but whatever it was that she had done to his leg allowed him to walk.

Perhaps the old gods of the North were smiling on their wayward daughter, for after less than a mile of limping they found shelter. In any other season they would have missed it, even if they had walked straight past, but for just this once winter was their friend.


	5. Chapter 5

Lirael

The ground dropped away, taking the stream they were following over a broken rocky edge and turning it into a waterfall. Much of the fall was ice, caught mid-tumble as it made its way to the interrupted stream bed below. Before the stream had frozen, it had narrowed, leaving a gap on either side of its normal path that revealed a velvet blackness behind the water. Without the ice, they would never have known that the cave was there.

Getting into the cave was no easy task. With two whole arms, two truncated arms and three good legs between them, they made their way down the rock like a maimed and dying spider. They slid and fell as much as they climbed, bracing and grabbing at the rocks, the tough little shrub-like trees stubbornly poking out of the crevices, and each other. They brought down half the hill with them, it seemed, tumbling down the last few feet in a shower of stones and soil. They lay at the bottom with their arms thrown up to protect their heads, until the last of it had pattered down around them. 

She had been weary, but he was trembling with pain and fatigue. He had to lean heavily on her shoulder to get to shelter. 

The cave smelled damp and a little rank, but seemed uninhabited. It wasn’t so dark from the inside, and they could see that it went a fair way back. Far enough for them to be well out of the wind. The floor was partially the frozen edge of a pool, but there was a rocky shore rising from it to meet the roof where it descended. There would only really be room to stand on the ice, any further in they would have to crouch and then crawl. Lirael did so, and satisfied herself that there was no entrance other than the waterfall.

The knight built a fire on the rough rocky shelf at the edge of the cave while what light there was still filtered bluely through the ice.

Lirael sat close to the fire-to-be, and made the simple mark for fire in her mind and hand. It was one of the first that children learnt. There was a brief glimmer and a tiny, brief rise in the temperature of the air cupped in her palm. Sir Jaime glanced curiously at her and made as if to speak, then returned to his flint and steel. She hadn't expected much more. She was exhausted, drained, hungry. That she had been able to conjure the merest flicker of Charter fire in her hand while in that state was immensely reassuring. She would have liked to cast a diamond of protection before settling in for the night, but she could do that about as easily as she could fly to the moon. 

They would have to stagger the watch again. They might be well out of sight, but a frozen waterfall was neither running water nor a wall - it would not protect them from the Dead. If anything came, thirsting after the life in their veins, they would have to protect themselves. Which would not be a problem, she tried to assure herself. Even though Jaime was a Southerling. But when she'd first seen him, being slowly bested by the dead Hand, he'd been exhausted and surprised. He knew what to expect now.

“Sir Jaime.” she said, once tentative tendrils of smoke had started to rise from the kindling.

“Mm?” His attention stayed fixed on the wood, willing it to catch. It did. Smoke started to gather in the air around their heads, making their eyes water.

“When I first found you, fighting in the clearing... had you ever fought one of those, one on one, before?”

“I have fought many opponents, my lady. It was just a man.” The flash of fear in her companion's eyes was quickly ousted by an almost natural-looking smile.

“It was not just a man.” 

In the past couple of years, the Old Kingdom had enjoyed an influx of people from the far South, taking up tools and repopulating the farms, towns and villages that had been left abandoned by the ravages and slaughters of the Interregnum. For their part, they were escaping burnt out, destroyed regions for free lands and property north of the Wall. For many of the refugees it was a dream come true, but it wasn't without its problems. Most of them had never even heard of the Old Kingdom, let alone its peculiarities. Lirael had left it to tongues more diplomatic than hers to try to explain to the newcomers why their sewing machines and electric lanterns wouldn't work, and why it really was a good idea to let the mage with the funny scar on their forehead treat your wounds and illnesses. A lot of people suddenly had to learn how to do things the old fashioned way, and not all of them liked it. That was their concern. But when it came to dealings with Free Magic and the Dead, that was her responsibility. She had long since run out of patience for humouring delusions and desperate cod-scientific theories about the nature of Free Magic and the Dead, after she had seen people die because of them. It was one thing for an idiot to insist on proving that there was nothing in the dark to be afraid of and going out and getting himself eaten by a Hish, but quite another to let that idiocy spread and have innocent people killed.

“It was a dead Hand. It's one of the least harmful types of Dead creatures, but still dangerous. You did well to fend it off as long as you did.” she told him firmly.

“My lady, I am no stranger to duelling. I may not be as skilled a swordsman with my left hand – if only you could have seen me fight when I was whole, you would not doubt me – but it is hardly a fair fight when the other man is mad from his wounds, starved and frozen half to death. If he had had the good sense to yield, I would probably have spared him just in time to see him keel over and die of his own accord.”

“It was not a man.” Lirael said patiently. “It was a corpse, animated by magic.” Jaime scowled, but didn't respond to that. How could he continue to deny the existence of magic when she had used it to repair his broken bones?

Nick would be worrying about her, she suddenly realised. This cold snap would have taken everyone by surprise, not just her. Roads would be impassable. Messages would only reliably get from one place to another by hawk, people would be snowed in. Only the Clayr and Royal household had access to Paperwings, and only the bravest pilots would dare to fly in a winter storm. Lirael – unquestionably brave, and now a skilled pilot - left the question of why she hadn't been flying from Yannyl to Belisaere well alone.

Nick knew that Lirael could look after herself, but even so, she wished she could have sent him a message before the snows hit, to reassure him. She wondered if the Clayr had seen the coming weather – but then, they saw fragmented, possible futures, not one sure vision. They missed things. Like a foreign nobleman lost in the woods.

“Your wife must be worried about you.” she said. Sir Jaime stiffened, and turned slowly towards her before answering.

“I am Kingsguard, my lady. We serve and protect only the king. We cannot wive.”

“Your lover, then.” she shrugged. “Whoever you meant by 'the woman I love', when you were telling me about what your father did to your brother's wife.”  
He grimaced, with a flash of guilt.

“I took a vow... when I was no more than five and ten, I vowed never to marry. Nor to father children, or hold lands.” 

He looked like he regretted that vow.

“Sometimes vows break, Sir Jaime. I'm not so naïve that I don't know that. I'm not going to tell on you, if that's what you're worried about. Go on, what's her name?”

The knight sighed, and with a wistful longing in his voice too deep to be faked, said

“Brienne.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our travellers talk about family, Lirael has to use the bells.

Jaime

Well, he wasn't going to name Cersei as his lover when he had already named her as his sister. Even though the “Lady” Abhorsen was only a wildling and not a lady at all, he didn't care to declare his incest.

Why the Maid's name had been the first to fall off his tongue, rather than any of the many comely women he knew, he couldn't say – but when he needed a name for the woman he was in love with, hers was the only one that came into his mind. 

“She must be very beautiful, to make you break your vow.” 

“She has the most stunning eyes.” he said absent-mindedly. He could have praised her valour, her bravery, her elegance in movement – as long as she was fighting, not dancing – but it was her eyes that he thought of. “All the blue of the sea. Tarth is called the Sapphire Isle for its rivers and lakes, but it could as well be for the eyes of its bravest maid.” 

He could all but see them before him. Blue eyes that were somehow warm. Eyes that showed all the moods and passions that her flat, broad, blotchy face stonily concealed, if only you knew how to read them. The cruel and juvenile had named her Brienne the Beauty to mock her plain features and awkward body, for Brienne was almost as tall as he was himself, and as broad of shoulder. But there was more to a man than how he wielded his sword, and more to a maid than the comeliness of her face. 

“And you, my lady? Have you a husband?” he asked. 

“No. I mean, we’re not that serious. We haven't talked about marriage. But he would say he's my boyfriend.” she responded, with a smile she might not have recognised on her own face. 

“'Boyfriend'?” Jaime lifted an eyebrow. 

“I know, right? As if I can't have other friends who are boys! Nick's from Ancelstierre, apparently that's what they say down there. You're not someone's lover, you're their 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend'. And you're not 'courting', you're 'stepping out together'.” 

“Foreign ways are often peculiar.” Jaime opined. “Has your not-quite-betrothed been living in your land long?” 

“A couple of years. He's still getting to grips with living in the Old Kingdom. He's a surprisingly good Charter mage, for someone who refused to admit magic even exists a year ago. He's ever so good at the why and the how, but not so much at the actual doing. But that's where Sameth really comes into his own, so they work very well together, when they aren't trying to get the noble boys to understand the finer points of cricket. But he does keep trying to make magic work like science. It's just as well he's got my nephew to keep him in line.” 

“Your nephew?” 

“Sam. He and Nick are old friends. We're all of an age, more or less.” she stopped and laughed. “I expect that sounds a bit bizarre, my having a nephew who's old enough to be my brother.” 

Jaime thought of his own nephews, who were also his sons, both of whom he had bowed the knee to as king, and one of whom was dead. 

“Hardly bizarre at all, my lady.” 

In the flickering orange glow of the fire, she looked young. More like Myrcella than Cersei. 

”I’ll take the first watch tonight.” he decided, but she shook her head. 

”No, you won’t. You’re injured, and I don’t know how well that fix is going to hold up. You need more rest than I do.” 

Jaime contemplated arguing; then he realised that Lirael was a woman who had made up her mind, and decided not to waste his breath. 

”You’ll wake me, if anything happens?” He asked, by way of compromise, getting as comfortable as he could, close enough to the fire to feel its heat on his face. 

”No worries.” she responded. He took that as a “yes”. 

A bell was ringing. Jaime got to his feet without really intending to, before he was even aware of being awake. Several hours must have passed. The fire was sullen embers, the air colder than when he'd bundled up in his cloak to sleep. Without moon or stars, the only light was a line of glowing gold, which he made out to be at hand height, made up – when he focused his eyes on it – of a series of unintelligible runes. The ice bounced it back, dimly illuminating a woman's silhouette, and another figure, stopped mid-step before her. Its eyes drank up the golden light and spat it back out, coldly blue. 

“Ser Jaime. A quick lesson.” Lirael stopped ringing the bell, but did not turn to face him. She sounded strange. Her voice didn’t seem to be quite her own - or at least, not only her own. There were echoes that spoke with her, reinforcing her words with ageless power and authority. 

“Lady Abhorsen...” He drew Widow's Wail as silently as he could, and stood by her, ready to strike. 

“Stay where you are, and listen. This, here, is a Dead Hand. The reason it’s not attacking is this bell, Saraneth. It binds the creature's spirit to my will, a function of Free Magic that we who keep down the dead use with the blessing of the Charter. Now watch.” She replaced the bell in its pouch. The other figure, a miserable thin thing of bones strung together with sinew, skin, and little else, did not move. He tried to see how its skeletal appearance was a trick of the shadows. The harder he looked at it, the more he confirmed what he didn't want to know. It didn't have eyelids. Or most of its cheeks. Its shoulders weren't just bony; they were bone. He couldn't see its feet, but he could see the gaps between its shin bones. Whoever the body had once housed, they weren't there any more and hadn't been for a long time. 

He felt strangely calm about this. Hadn’t he known already? He just hadn't wanted to say it out loud, lest the lady think him mad. Lest he think himself mad. 

The wildling drew another bell from higher up the bandolier. She pinched the clapper in her fingers, so it did not ring until she wanted it to. 

“This bell is Kibeth, also known as the Walker, or the Disreputable Dog. When I ring her, the spirit animating this body will be forced back into Death. Then the body will be just a corpse again.” She rang the bell, and Jaime thought he saw the wight – for surely that was the name for what it was – ooze out a second shadow, before it collapsed into a pile of skin and bones that could hardly be recognised as having formerly been human. 

“That's what the bells are for?” He asked in a hushed voice. He felt an unfamiliar feeling as the lady Lirael turned to look at him, and managed to identify it as fear. This was power. _I could boil your brain inside your skull if I had to_. No longer did that sound like an idle boast. “And the sword?” It was in her hand – her golden hand – the surface still glowing. No father or brother raged at its loss - it belonged to her. 

“This.” 

She pointed the sword at the body, holding it with both hands. He saw her mouth move, and heard strange sounds inside his head which didn't seem to have bothered with going through his ears. The lights on the sword flared bright and ran together like hot wax, dripping into the body. When she stopped speaking, smoke started to rise from the remains where the sword point had been resting on it, followed by shy little flames that soon found their boldness and consumed the whole wreck of the body. The ice beneath melted and swallowed up the ashes, before freezing again. When it was gone, the fire at his back jumped back up into yellow flame. Jaime looked at the young woman anew. 

“You are a _maegi_.” The word came to him dredged up from some deep corner of his memory, unencumbered by definition. But he knew it was right. 

“Charter Mage. I am an Abhorsen, so I also make some use of Free Magic. I keep the Dead in death where they belong. You look afraid, Ser Jaime. I hope it isn't because of me.” She sounded once more like a young girl. 

He realised that he was slack-jawed with wonder. 

“Your hand. You were using it. Your fingers... you said they were just jointed!” Jaime blurted after closing his mouth. 

Lirael opened her fingers again, and splayed them wide. 

“No, I just didn't tell you the whole truth. Anyway, they are. They have to be jointed in order to move.” He gaped for half a second, then grasped her hand and held in front of the fire. He could see the flames through the gold filigree. 

“How?” He asked, a hungry look on his face. “How does it work, some sort of puppetry? And where did you get it?” 

“It's magic. My nephew made it for me.” she said. 

“Magic.” he breathed again, this time without scorn. “Show me again?” 

She closed her fist, then extended her fingers, one at a time. Her second and third fingers had greater dexterity than real ones, moving entirely independently of each other. 

“I've always been told that magic is gone from the world, gone with the last of the dragons, hundreds of years ago... yet here it is.” 

“So you believe your eyes?” 

“Of course.” 

“Not everyone does.” 

“They say there are dragons again, across the Narrow Sea. Only sailor's tales, of course, but now... I wonder.” Of course, if there were dragons again, there would be dragonriders... but that would be a battle for another day. One he could not guarantee he would see. 

“With a hand like that, I could wield a sword again.” The desire he felt was almost lust. To have a working, magical hand. To be able to grasp a knife, snap his fingers, brush his hair from his face... “I don't suppose I could try it..?” 

“It only works on me.” She replied quickly. “It only does what I tell it to because it was made for me. Besides, it wouldn't fit you – even if you were the same size as me, it starts halfway down my arm.” 

“Of course.” It had been a stupid idea, impulsive. Her hand would never fit his stump, and he wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. He swallowed and gestured to the bells. “So the first one was Seranith, which forced the wight to obey you, and the second was... Kibith?” 

“Saraneth and Kibeth.” she confirmed. 

“And that sent the spirit into death.” She nodded. He swallowed before asking his next question. 

“What do the others do?” 

Lirael moved a branch from the edge of the fire into the middle, where its needles snapped into a brief explosion of light and heat before settling down into steady flame. She sat cross-legged by the blaze, and he did likewise. 

“This is Ranna.” She laid a single finger on the smallest bell, just below her right shoulder. “The sleep bringer. It is the smallest and least powerful of the bells, and by that token, the least dangerous to the wielder. Depending on the ringer's intention, it will either send the creature or person the ringer is concentrating on to sleep, or wake them.” She touched the next bell on the strap. “Mosrael, also called the Waker. This one will bring spirits from Death back into the realm of the living, but the ringer will be sent back into Death in their place.” 

“Do you use that one often?” Jaime asked, morbid fascination moving his tongue for him. 

“No.” Lirael shot him a look for interrupting him. “Mosrael is used almost exclusively by necromancers to create Dead servants. There are other uses, but they are rare.” The touch she gave the third bell was more like a caress. “Kibeth, the Walker, Disreputable Dog, or just Dog. She has the power over movement – to make a spirit walk into Death, or to stop them in their tracks. An inexperienced necromancer, or one without much power, may find that she takes control and marches them into Death against their wishes. She is the bell Abhorsens depend on the most to banish Dead and Free Magic creatures.” She touched the fourth bell. “Dyrim. The Speaker. Can be used to force speech or silence. Useful if you need to question a dead spirit.” The fifth bell was the size of a child's fist. “Belgaer is the Thinker. It can restore or remove independent thought – the necromancers use it to create unthinking slaves. It can also remove memories.” She glanced up for a moment as if a thought had struck her, then fled again. “Saraneth.” She touched the sixth bell. “The Binder. Once this bell is rung, the listener – in our case just now, that dead Hand – is forced to listen to and obey the ringer. This is a very strong bell. If you don't know what you're doing, or ring it badly, it can take your will.” She hesitated before touching the last, largest bell, and did so with only the tip of her finger. “Astarael, the Sorrowful. Sometimes called the Weeper. There's only one way to ring this bell, and no way to get it wrong.” Jaime saw that the leather pouch holding this bell was uncreased and shining with beeswax polish, where the one next to it was worn, the top layer of the leather flaking off along deep creases where it was handled to open it. “All who hear her die.” 

Jaime nodded, mentally agog at the new knowledge. 

“Does your sword have a name as well?” Named swords were more familiar to him. Lirael drew her steel, and laid it across her lap. 

“Lihama. Nehima's heir. Nehima was consumed in the binding of the Destroyer, as I was to have been, except-” She waggled her right hand in the air with a little smile, “-the Disreputable Dog had other ideas. She bit my hand off, but since it was already burning, it actually hurt less.” 

The firelight reflected off runes in the surface of her blade. Jaime drew his own, watching the way the flames made the ripples in the steel seem to move. 

“Widow's Wail. Don't blame me, that's what my s-” _Nearly called him my son there_. “-sovereign lord called her. She has a larger sister called Oathkeeper, which I gave to the Maid of Tarth to wield.” Jaime hoped Brienne was faring well. The last time he'd seen her had been troubling. She'd looked awful when she came to him, raving about finding the Stark girl and begging him to come with her to retrieve the lass. He'd gone, as well. He'd walked right up to the jaws of the trap, but not into them. Whatever Brienne of Tarth may be – bold, honest, loyal, faithful, formidable in battle – she was a terrible liar. He had barely needed to make her repeat the tale before it fell apart, and she with it. _It does not suit her to be a puppet. She makes a very poor one_. Somehow he had coaxed from her the fact that lives depended on her delivering him to answer for his crimes to some band of outlaws, insisting that Lady Stark wanted him dead. He had believed that she believed it. Then the whole messy business with the girl and the hollow hill, and the flames, and the wrong man in the right armour... he'd got out of there, and he knew that she had too. Was almost certain she had. It seemed the most likely outcome. He hoped. 

He'd had to run back to King's Landing to see what he could do to sort out the mess there, but no sooner had he arrived and heard of Uncle Kevan's death – by crossbow, as if someone were baiting him to defend Tyrion as one of the only people in the world who knew that it couldn't possibly have been him and reveal his involvement in his brother's escape – and counted the roses in court, than he'd turned right around to go and find the little devil. _If the lions have any hope of keeping our king on the Iron Throne, he needs the most cunning of his kinsmen around him. Whatever else he may be, Tyrion is cunning_. He had managed to variously intimidate, bribe, and charm the household staff to gain an informal audience with little Tommen, but he had been unable to find a way past the underlings of the Faith to see Cersei. Once he would have cut his way through them and damn them to the seven hells if they tried to stop him. Now that the High Sparrow had soldiers, however tattered and grubby, he knew that advertising his presence would most likely end in his being locked in a cell as his sister's co-accused, charged with incest, fornication, and if they were feeling generous, a double helping of regicide. It was a great enough risk going to the Red Keep to see his son. 

Tommen had been busy playing with his kittens when Jaime had entered his solar through the servant's entrance, and the king had joyfully introduced his Uncle Jaime to Ser Pounce, Lady Whiskers and Boots. Ser Pounce and Boots were engaging little creatures, to be sure, hunting a feather on a string that Tommen dangled from a chubby hand and made dance across the floor. All he'd seen of the third cat was a ball of silky black on a cushion with a tail that tapped a warning not to come too close when he approached. The only thing King Tommen seemed to enjoy even half as much as playing with his pets was squishing his seal into wax on official documents, which was convenient. He hadn't asked Jaime what he was affixing his mark to, just given it a hearty stamp with a careful wobble of his hand to make sure that the golden wax got into every single crevice and indentation of the mould. 

“You have to smoosh it around like this, Uncle Jaime.” The boy had explained. “Then you don't get bubbles. See? It's exactly the same, only backwards.” He'd lifted the royal seal to show Jaime, who made appropriately impressed noises. 

“I see, your Grace. That's probably the best seal I've ever laid eyes on.” Tommen beamed. “Your Grace -” He noted that the boy still took joy from being honoured thusly by his seniors, which was almost everyone. “I would beg a boon.” 

“ _You_ don't have to beg, Uncle Jaime.” The little king told him matter-of-factly. 

“It is a somewhat delicate matter, of great import. I would ask that you don't tell anyone that I was here. This is a very secret meeting – no-one must know that I was ever here.” 

“Not even Mama?” Tommen's smooth brow creased with confusion. 

“Not even Mama. For I won't be able to see her, but if she learns that I was nearby and didn't visit, she will be very sad and cross. You wouldn't want to make her Grace cross, would you?” Tommen pursed his lips and shook his head. _Gods, it's too easy. He affixes his seal to anything placed before him, and agrees with anyone who speaks him gently... he needs guidance, and friends. Else he'll be nothing more than a biddable figurehead._ Jaime affected a conspiratorial grin. 

“I'm going to try to find your Uncle Tyrion.” 

“Mama doesn't like Uncle Tyrion.” Tommen said, a waver of uncertainty in his voice. “She says he's a bad man, but he was always nice to me.” Jaime turned a grimace into a smile. 

“It's complicated, your Grace. Uncle Tyrion is complicated too. He isn't nice to everybody, but he's not a bad man either.” _He just murdered his whore, my father and your brother, that's all_. 

Something caught Jaime's eye on the wall, a line of glinting red. They were rubies, adorning a leather scabbard the colour of drying blood. A golden lion's head snarled above the crossguard. _Oathkeeper?_ But no, Oathkeeper was with Brienne, wherever she had ended up. No, this was a smaller sword, for a smaller hand. _Widow's Wail._

“Tommen, is that Joffrey's sword?” He nodded towards it. The little king scowled. 

“That horrid thing. Ser Trant says I'm to train at arms until I can best a man grown and then I can wield it and not before, but I don't want to wield it anyway. It's too sharp. I cut my finger on it and blood went everywhere, it went all over my best gold velvet doublet and ruined it.” 

Jaime had nodded, thoughtfully. 

“Might I borrow it, your Grace?” 

Tommen had been more than happy for him to take one of the finest blades in the kingdom from him, wrapped up in a hempen sack and stuffed into the bottom of a pack, before he melted back into the shadows and left the city as tracelessly as he had come. 

“She may be too short for me, and gaudier than a troupe of Tyroshi mummers, but she’s Valyrian steel.” The ruby eyes of Widow’s Wail’s lions-head pommel sparkled, and for a whimsical moment, Jaime wondered if it was possible that they might have once adorned Prince Rhaegar’s breastplate. They couldn’t have all been lost to the Trident, and it wasn’t impossible that some which had remained on his body might have found their way into the royal treasury. “Nothing holds an edge like it. No other steel is so light, but also so strong. No other steel was forged with magic as much as hammer and anvil. I never used to care if the smiths of old chanted spells while they worked, or their mother’s recipe for plum pudding, it made no difference to me - but if there’s any trace of the old Valyrian sorcery left in this blade now, I am glad to have it by my side.”


End file.
